A Framework for Dependability Consensus Building and In-Operation Assurance

We present a framework for dependability consensus building and in-operation assurance for information systems, and show the current prototype implementation. Today, information systems are ever changing systems: they are always modified and updated to satisfy user’s changing requirements and deal with environmental changes. Furthermore, information systems must cope with system failures and continue to be dependable during operational phase. Unfortunately, however, as recently many serious failures in information systems have been reported, it is becoming much difficult to assure the dependability of information systems especially in the operational phases. For this problem, we observe that there should be a framework for adapting to changes and failures that integrates conventional requirement elicitation, risk analysis, and assurance methods during the whole lifecycle of the information system. Our proposed framework consists of a process cycle for consensus building among stakeholders with conventional requirement elicitation methods, risk analysis methods, and assurance cases, documents for system assurance recently widely used in safety and other areas. This paper explains the process lifecycle, a case study using the cycle, and a prototype implementation for in-operation assurance.